1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to virtual desktop infrastructure/integration (VDI) softphone architecture. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention relate to a system and method for assuring quality real-time communication experience in a virtual machine.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a virtual machine is deployed in a data center, a thin client uses a remote desktop protocol to access the virtual machine. A softphone computer program can be deployed on such a virtual machine, and configured to provide a user control interface, as well as terminate incoming voice and video streams, and generate outgoing voice and video streams. Local virtual device drivers in the virtual machine are used to render incoming audio and video, and to capture the outgoing audio and video. The remote desktop protocol provides the transfer of voice and video data between the virtual machine and the thin client system that sits with the employee using the desktop. Improvements in this protocol can speed the transmission of real-time voice and video between the virtual machine and the thin client. However, because the voice & video is “terminated” in the softphone, rendered, and then replicated using other protocols to the thin client, valuable capabilities are lost or degraded. For example, QOS, VLAN marking, and visibility from centralized Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) management systems out to the user's endpoint device are examples of session parameters that are lost or significantly degraded. Furthermore, by rendering the voice and video, the resulting data stream may be much larger (due to less compression), and be degraded in quality due to rendering and recomposing for transmission from the virtual machine to the thin client.
Known simple media acceleration techniques in the market do not differentiate video traffic for viewing from video traffic associated with live calling. For example, Citrix has attempted to speed the transmission between the client and the VM using the HDX family of protocol improvements. VMware has similar improvements underway for generic real time media transmission. Commercial practice is to write better virtual device drivers, or to redirect downstream multimedia content for viewing to the client device. However, current systems and methods terminate the SIP session, and replace it with a protocol that inherently does not support QOS/VLAN/visibility to real-time communications systems.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method for assuring quality real-time communication experience in a virtual machine, which is capable of separating voice and video traffic simply and efficiently.